The United Nations and Changing World Politics explores the role of the UN and its associated family of organizations and specialized agencies in contemporary global governance. The UN is seemingly always in transition, which is central to understanding world politics and also why this book is in its seventh edition. The three substantive sections of this text—international peace and security, human rights and humanitarian affairs, and sustainable human development—continue to be at the center of our own approaches to international organization and law. How the UN, with its 193 member states, responds to the related challenges, both old and new, is the substance of this book.
The United Nations has many shortcomings that involve politics entrenched in state rivalries between the haves and have-nots, competing power centers, and bureaucratic infighting to control agendas and resources. We have endeavored to capture the UN’s essence as a political organization caught in the struggle to make public policy through the exercise of power. We stress how representatives of member states and other actors, such as international civil servants and nongovernmental organizations, seek to use UN symbols and procedures to shape policy. Policymaking always involves power, understood as a synonym for influence. We also observe how UN structures and processes constrain the exercise of power. Hard power involves coercion through manipulation of economic resources and military force. Soft power involves persuasion and pressure through words and symbolic acts. The central question, for those interested in the United Nations, is who seeks what policy objective, using what power, and with what outcome? What occurs at the UN, to paraphrase Harold Lasswell’s classic 1936 formulation of politics, is about Who Gets What, When, How.
The United Nations is about global governance without a world government, or attempts to collectively manage transnational problems in the absence of the “normal” attributes of government. These attributes include a true legislature, a single executive branch, an integrated court system, and, above all, a legitimate monopoly on the exercise of force. Our primary objective is to get students to understand the UN as part of the fabric of world politics and its presumed centrality in managing complicated problems involving war, reconstruction, protection and promotion of human dignity, development, and environmental protection. We construct a balance sheet of achievements and shortcomings, and we address the UN’s role relative to regional organizations, unilateral undertakings, and ad hoc arrangements.
We also wanted to capture the essence of public international law as an institution that exerts real influence on real political struggles. We emphasize that, like all public law, the international version is not a technical subject independent of politics but rather part and parcel of world politics. International law is formulated through a political process, frequently revolving around a variety of UN forums. Consequently, public international law interacts with world politics, sometimes shaping it greatly and sometimes only slightly or not at all.
We also stress the importance of history. The present and the future have a history. When seemingly new issues arise, there is always a background to the issue that affects its management or disposition. When U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell spoke at the UN Security Council in early 2003 about whether Iraq had complied with previous council resolutions demanding disarmament, many commentators referred back to the council of 1962. Then, U.S. permanent representative Adlai Stevenson dramatically confronted the Soviet Union over the issue of Soviet missiles in Cuba. In 2003 the United States did not have the same kind of compelling evidence—the “smoking gun”—of denied weapons activity presented some forty years earlier. Still, UN history was part of the drama for Powell’s presentation. History does not necessarily determine the future—path dependency is an overused image—but history often affects the future in that it provides insights and lessons and frequently circumscribes policy options and prescriptions. The history of such issues as using military force, coordinating humanitarian assistance, and promoting sustainable development affects new policy decisions. Knowing this history is essential for understanding UN politics. We want readers to learn the political and legal history of the UN so that present and future choices can be analyzed and debated against that background.
We have endeavored to design this book so that it can be used in at least two ways. First, we want it to serve as a core text in college courses on international organization and the United Nations, and we also are immodest enough to believe that many graduate students and even diplomats could learn a great deal from these pages. Second, we want it to be useful as supplemental reading in other courses, such as international relations and international law. Thus, the essentials of politics at the UN in three central arenas (security, human rights, and sustainable human development) provide the spine for this book because of their intrinsic importance in world politics and because the United Nations has had significant normative and operational impacts in all three. We have brought our collective experiences and judgment to bear on analyses of these issues. If we can get students to better understand the United Nations as a political organization affected by international law, with its own history; if we can accurately portray the UN as greatly affected by basic changes in its political milieu; and if we can provide insights about what the UN has done and how these efforts might be improved in the future, we will have succeeded.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This text builds on six previous editions, which would not have been as insightful without the contributions of others. Four outside reviewers read the original manuscript of the first edition in 1993. Craig Murphy of Wellesley College and Lawrence Finkelstein, then at Northern Illinois University, are both recognized scholars of international organization and world politics; they provided comments through the cooperation of the International Organization Section of the International Studies Association (ISA). Two other readers, unknown to us, were provided by Westview Press. A discussion group focused on this manuscript at the annual meeting of the Academic Council on the United Nations System (ACUNS) in Montreal in June 1993. Another ISA panel focused on the book at the 2002 conference in New Orleans. Thus this book is in many ways a product of the ISA and ACUNS.
We would like to express our special gratitude to those staff members of our respective academic institutions who—with good humor and professionalism—assisted in the preparation of the various versions of the manuscript over time. We thank Danielle Zach, Janet Reilly, and Elisa Athonvarangkul at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York for their essential contributions. Without the help of Susan Costa, Mary Lhowe, Melissa Phillips, Fred Fullerton, and Laura Sadovnikoff at Brown University’s Watson Institute, the earliest editions would have been considerably slower in appearing and certainly less well presented. Another word of appreciation goes to those younger researchers who have helped at one stage or another in framing arguments, checking facts and endnotes, and prodding their mentors: Peter Breil, Christopher Brodhead, Cindy Collins, Paula L’Ecuyer, Jean Garrison, Mutuma Ruteere, Barbara Ann Rieffer, Lekesha Harris, Peter Söderholm, Corinne Jiminez, and Caitlin Creech.
We are delighted that Michael Doyle agreed to grace these pages with an original foreword. From his current position at Columbia University, he brings to the classroom and research a distinguished and almost unparalleled reputation as an international relations theorist who also has not shied away from applied research on the ground about peacekeeping and a stint as a UN assistant secretary-general.
Finally, we also are honored to acknowledge those colleagues and friends who contributed their insights in forewords to previous editions. Inis L. Claude, in his foreword to the second edition, captured the prominence the UN enjoyed in the immediate post–Cold War era and foreshadowed the challenges faced by the UN in the wake of disintegrating states. In the third edition, Leon Gordenker cautioned that no single theory can capture the complexities of the UN policies and processes and prodded us to consider what encourages the UN to influence global life and what holds it back. In the fourth, James O. C. Jonas noted that the role of the Secretariat and the secretary-general is too often downplayed and needs further elucidation if we are to understand how and why the UN behaves as it does. Richard Jolly set the pessimistic tone of the 2005 World Summit in the fifth edition’s foreword, noting that the decade-long effort to reform the UN was systematically undermined by the neoconservative administration of George W. Bush; coupled with the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 without Security Council authorization, the UN suffered a critical leadership deficit. The foreword of the sixth edition, by Ramesh Thakur, highlighted the political changes in important states, including the United States, and stressed that, on balance, the world is a better and safer place because of the UN. Because of space constraints, we are no longer able to present the full texts of these previous forewords; however, they are available on the publisher’s website at www.westviewpress.com.
Although only the authors are responsible for the final version, we acknowledge with gratitude the time and effort that others have put into improving our work.
Thomas G. Weiss
David P. Forsythe
Roger A. Coate
Kelly-Kate Pease
December 2012